Violence with a side of puppy videos

Screens and minds #2

This is the second in a loose series exploring the relationship between screens and our thoughts, behaviours and emotions. You can read the rationale behind the series in the second half of this post and the first (standalone) instalment here.

CW: this piece references the ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine, and is generally just more of a sober read than usual. (It isn’t about Israel and Palestine, though. For wise, nuanced and compassionate writing on that topic, I recommend Life Is A Sacred Text by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (formerly of Substack but now publishing elsewhere), especially this piece and this one.)

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A few weeks ago I read, on my phone, about some of the horrifying sexual violence inflicted on Israeli women by Hamas terrorists on October 7th. At around the same time, a few hours later perhaps, I saw a video of a journalist in Gaza introducing two tiny babies, Khaled and Hannah, and asking us to pray that they would still be alive tomorrow. That same day I saw a picture of the words ‘We did what we could’, written on a whiteboard in Al Awda hospital in Gaza by a doctor who’d since been killed in an airstrike.

Also that same day, also on my phone: I watched a labrador hiding stolen muffins behind sofa cushions, a group of men singing a capella show tunes, and someone doing an impression of ‘Boomer Dad and the Christmas presents’. An email notification told me I had a new Substack subscriber. A friend with academic library privileges kindly sent me the PDF of a journal article I wanted to read. I learned that one of my neighbours was in want of a power cable and that several others were deeply concerned about the state of our bin room.

Putting the above paragraph next to the one before it feels obscene, but it’s the sort of juxtaposition that’s happening all the time, for all of us. I’ve simplified it here, for reasons of rhetorical elegance — very bad stuff in paragraph one, good or innocuous stuff in paragraph two — but in reality it came to me in a jumble.

Once upon a time these things would have been kept separate. I would have learned about the violence in the Middle East from the TV or radio at 6pm or 10pm. Otherwise I would have bought a newspaper and read about it, during which time I would not have been doing much apart from reading the newspaper. I would not have been using the newspaper to contact my friends, or watch videos of a stranger’s pet, or hate-scroll down a thread of local homeowners finding connection through their shared love of complaining.

In a recent essay, the novelist

Catherine Lacey

writes about riding the New York subway,

watching people around me thumb through a mix of genocide and selfies and advertisements and war photography. I, too, read the headlines about [the violence in Gaza] right next to recipes for soup or profiles of smiling millennial CEOs.

As do I; as, I imagine, do we all. It’s a fact of modern-day digital experience that the boundary between the horrific and the benign is shaky, if not constantly dissolving.

In other areas of life, we assiduously draw limits around things. We shudder to recall the damaging boundary-blurring that happened during lockdown, with people expected to live, work and home-school their children simultaneously; perhaps it’s no coincidence that ‘boundaries’ are having a moment now. We’re supposed to lay them down and gently inform others when they butt up against them: protecting our mental health, honouring our need to rest. Elsewhere, we recognise the importance of having distinct spaces for distinct activities. I know I’m not alone in getting more done when I work from the office than when I work from my living room, while anyone who’s ever struggled with insomnia will be familiar with the advice to make your bedroom a place for sleep and nothing else.

So it’s a curious phenomenon, this habit we have of drip-feeding ourselves information about bad things, rather than ring-fencing a dedicated but finite time to absorb it properly. The word ‘doom-scrolling’ is now firmly embedded in the lexicon, but I’d guess there’s more variety to most people’s scrolling experience: a little doom here, a little light relief there, the bad peppered in amongst the good and the harmless. We hear a lot about the twenty-four hour news cycle seeping into the rest of life, making us anxious and uneasy. We don’t tend to hear about that process happening in reverse, but isn’t it also true that the rest of life — specifically online life, with its humour and silliness and vacuousness — can seep into the news cycle right back?

The thing with online news consumption is that while, on the one hand, there’s a risk of being drawn down distressing rabbit holes, on the other, it’s never been easier to look away. You can look away from traditional media too, obviously, by changing the channel or turning off the radio or closing the newspaper. The difference is that these acts, however negligible, are all decisions. Online, everyone is already skimming everything anyway, so if I flick past a reel about the lack of clean water in Gaza or the current state of affairs in Ukraine, I can convince myself that I’m not ‘looking away’ as such, but merely treating those particular posts in the same way I’d treat any number of others. Likewise, I needn’t question my own motives if I put my phone down halfway through an article about the British government’s deplorable treatment of asylum seekers: putting one’s phone down is considered a virtue, even an act of strength, in these days of universal screen addiction.

We all know that if we want to enjoy and savour our lives, we need to look up from our screens and take notice of the good things all around us: a beam of winter sun, the first sip of coffee in the morning, a child saying something hilarious in public. What if the difficult but necessary flip side to this — the yang to that yin — were that we need to take proper time to absorb and reflect on the big, bad things, too? What would happen if we listened without covering our ears, descending into a flailing panic, or partaking in performative outrage, but just sat with our sadness and our fear and our disbelief, giving them the time and attention they deserve?

I don’t quite know yet what asking these questions means for my own habits and behaviours, but I’ll let you know if I figure it out.

‘Til soon,

Kx

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